Honestly, this setting felt familiar. She seemed to have seen it somewhere before.
"In other words, if the soul is damaged, the damage manifests in the flesh? And then, so long as that damage to the soul is not healed, the flesh has no way to heal either, is that what it means? Then... can the shape of a soul be changed? And if it were changed, would that mean an alteration in appearance and physical structure?"
Seraphia had remembered. This way of framing the setting was connected to the ability of a villain in a work from her previous life that had been wildly popular in every sense.
That villain's ability was to observe, to touch and to alter a human soul, which let him heal people, and equally let him rewrite them into remodelled humans under his control.
Miriam pushed her glasses up, and the reflection on the lenses made it impossible for Seraphia to read her eyes for a moment.
"Why would that occur to you? Ordinarily, a person would only think as far as soul damage preventing a wound from closing."
The abrupt counter-question left Seraphia frozen where she stood.
She seemed to have shown her hand.
A modern Earth person living in the age of the information explosion has a very strong grasp of all sorts of scattered, tangential thinking—
Above all, virtually every common ability that might appear within a fantasy worldview has already been raised by those creators at some point, and so, naturally enough, anyone who has read a lot of such works will find the related ideas easy to arrive at.
"Mm..." Seraphia's thoughts turned rapidly, and she quickly found a line that would patch the hole. "The Corruption Sickness. That seems to be exactly this sort of thing, doesn't it?"
"The Corruption Sickness, so called, is a condition produced after the shape of the soul is altered by pollution. There is also a school of thought holding that the malformed angel-type monsters the Church must purify are perhaps the result of a soul's shape being corrupted."
A sense of danger.
【This is a probe.】
Almost instantly, Seraphia caught it.
These church people were still not so ready to trust an angel who had appeared out of nowhere.
The other Holy Wings she knew of all seemed to have been welcomed back by the Church shortly after being born.
At least in the Church's public records, their origins were perfectly clear.
Essentially, they had been brainwashed from childhood on, so everything about them was known inside and out.
Whereas an angel who had turned up suddenly, already possessing a complete faculty of cognition, was still within their range of surveillance.
【Damn it... where's the pleasant little adventure out of a toilet-paper Japanese light novel that I wanted? From the moment I crossed over until now it's been nothing but crises. I want to go out into the wilds and beat up some ultra-weak monsters like goblins and slimes!】
"But in the end, that thing is a monster, isn't it? A monster that can simply be... purified."
Hatred, and some sharp emotion Seraphia could not put a name to, radiated out of her shadow.
The little sister she had got for free was angry.
Seraphia understood perfectly well that the emotion was not directed at her, but at this woman in front of them who was using their race as a topic with which to probe.
Miriam, however, had plainly not yet learned to hide all of her feelings. Compared with that watertight Executor of the tribunal, this person in front of her, one of the original work's heroines, had exposed something extremely important in the exchange just now.
At a moment like this Seraphia could not help being grateful that what was installed inside this body was a 'cold-blooded' transmigrator, someone who could keep her inner calm with ease in the face of a topic like this.
【All right, fine—】
An unpleasantness she could not shake remained inside her.
She had only skimmed the original owner's memories at a glance, and yet those first-hand memories and experiences still affected her own feelings.
For the first time, Seraphia felt a doubt.
Was there truly a soul from Earth installed inside the person standing here?
Was it not possible that the otherworld Seraphia had acquired an Earth person's memories and feelings... and then, when the box sealed those memories away, the Earth person's memories and feelings had temporarily taken the primary position, producing the illusion of 【I have crossed over】?
"Mm, it is a monster, that's correct. What I was thinking about is... if a person possessed a soul shape different from a human's from the very beginning, perhaps through a coincidence of coincidences, or perhaps as the effect of some special magic... within the Church's understanding, how ought an existence like that to be classified?"
【How ought it to be classified? As a 'monster', obviously.】
Seraphia could no longer suppress the unpleasantness in her chest. Her expression turned cold outright, and the emotion in her shadow moved gradually to the brink of running loose.
The question this glasses girl was turning over was easy enough to understand from a human standpoint.
As a 'perfect' ordinary individual, she could treat herself entirely as the normal standard, and then consider how those anomalous objects ought to be defined.
But as one of the 'anomalous individuals' being defined by these people, Seraphia found listening to words like that genuinely grating.
And there was a curious sense of déjà vu to it.
【That's right. It was exactly like this in my previous life too.】
Her mind reproduced what had happened back on Earth, when she had still been a child at school.
Because she was new, because her way of speaking was different, because her habits were different, because she did not understand what they liked—
Malice between one person and another is born out of the very simplest things.
That was why she hated them.
Those strong ones born unafraid of a challenge, and those people at the centre of the crowd who were born to be loved.
That profound malice between people seemed as though it would never touch this sort of person at all.
Miriam's hand, holding her glasses, stopped in mid-air.
She seemed only then to realize what she had just asked.
"...I'm sorry, Lady Holy Wing."
She lowered her head slightly and took half a step back.
"That question just now was very rude. I should not have placed your soul side by side with the existences the Church calls corrupted monsters."
"Are you suspecting that I am that kind of monster too?"
"I did not mean that."
Miriam answered quickly, yet without rushing to defend herself.
"Only that, on seeing a phenomenon I cannot explain, I instinctively thought of the closest possibility. But that does not mean I have any right to treat you as the object that verifies a conjecture."
She raised her eyes, and the gaze behind the lenses still held a residue of curiosity, though she had already reined a great deal of it in of her own accord.
"Please forgive my offence. I will not pursue this matter again."
The emotion within the shadow had still not subsided.
Seraphia did not answer at once either.
She looked at Miriam standing before her with her head lowered, and the unpleasantness inside her did not vanish simply because the other woman had offered an apology.
Human malice towards their own kind radiates out through speech and stings the hearts of others, and a great deal of the time the one who inflicts it will try to turn the page on the whole affair with one weightless apology.
【But right now... I can't afford to fall out with her too badly.】
"I accept your apology."
Seraphia's voice had returned to calm.
"But I do not like being compared with those monsters."
"I understand."
Miriam nodded.
She did not go on explaining, nor did she try to defend herself with "I was only curious".
That surprised Seraphia a little.
【At least she knows when to shut up.】
"Although... if you are willing to speak of it, I would still like to hear how exactly you define... no. Please, forget it."
Miriam paused, seeming to realize she had nearly gone on pressing the question by momentum, and corrected herself at once.
That did rather astonish Seraphia. Was one supposed to say: truly worthy of the nickname 【Legendary Investigator】?
To have come this far and still be able to say a thing like that was unexpectedly pure of her.
Just then, Shu on the bed let out a groan of pain.
"Nngh..."
Seraphia and Miriam turned their heads at the same moment.
The boy's fingers moved slightly, and then he slowly opened his eyes.
"Where is this..."
"The church's recovery room."
Miriam walked to the bedside and bent down to check his condition.
"How do you feel?"
Shu blinked, seeming to be working hard to recall what had happened before he lost consciousness.
"My back... still hurts a little."
"That's normal. Your body has recovered, but the soul and the flesh still need a little time to grow used to each other again."
"What about Miss Seraphia?"
Shu's gaze went past Miriam and landed on Miss Angel beside her.
"You weren't hurt, were you?"
【This guy has only just woken up, and the first thing he does is ask about me?】
"I wasn't hurt."
Seraphia answered without thinking.
"Then... what about that person?"
【He means the one he shielded with his own body. This person really is...】
"They're all right as well."
"Mm... that's good."
Shu was visibly relieved.
He had only just been battered half to death in a fire himself, and on waking he was still worrying about other people.
Then his eyes slowly closed again. Since self-healing is at its fastest during sleep, his body had naturally slipped back into dormancy once it relaxed.
For some reason, the Seraphia of this moment could no longer read his emotions clearly.
The only emotion she could feel anywhere around her was Nephim's, hidden in the shadow.
【It's probably because this ability hasn't grown in properly yet, isn't it?】
"Miss Miriam, the Bishop asks you to come at once. I still have to go and notify the others, so please be there as soon as you can."
The sister outside the door sounded somewhat tense, and left immediately after delivering her message.
"There are new findings regarding last night's workshop explosion."
Miriam's expression shifted slightly.
She glanced back at Seraphia, then quickly withdrew her gaze.
"Understood."
She walked to the doorway, but stopped before opening the door.
"Lady Holy Wing."
"What is it?"
"I am still very curious about why you would arrive at that question... is it not that you are curious about the answer yourself? That in fact you and that... perhaps?"
At this point Seraphia was genuinely certain the woman bore no malice.
A lunatic for knowledge.
"From what standpoint are you saying this?"
"Mm... as a 【Scholar】, I suppose. I have seen some rather 【interesting】 material before... if it interests you... please come and find me afterwards."
She left her address behind, and went.
From within the shadow, Nephim's confusion carried across, and that was Seraphia's own feeling at this moment as well.